We have all done it to a greater or lesser extent. Teenaged boys do it more — and more to the extreme end; it’s just the way the makers made us. (That’s my daughter, Chelsea’s, rationale for things she doesn’t have an explanation for: “That’s the way the makers made me, Dad” and then she’s done with the topic whether I am or not.)

My brother, David, is by all measures a straight-and-narrow, stand-up guy and has been for so many decades I’ve lost count. But there was this one time when he was a teen that he demonstrated just how far we boys can go when given the opportunity.

My parents invited friends of theirs – Lane and Gloria – who lived in Cambridge, MA, down to Hampton for a weekend away. They’d planned a trip somewhere and left all six of us kids home. It was supposed to be a shared babysitting responsibility twixt David and me but that was never in the cards as far as David was concerned. Lane and Gloria made the journey from Cambridge in their shiny new ’67 Plymouth Valiant and Lane casually left the keys to his car on the kitchen counter, unsuspecting of the mind of a teenager who didn’t have his own car.

Not many minutes after Lane, Gloria, and my parents had poured themselves into the Toronado and left Hampton behind, my brother called up Don Inman, grabbed the keys off the counter, and took off in Lane’s Valiant without so much as a “see ya.” I guess the two of them bombed around for a few hours, eventually finding themselves on Kimball Hill Road. David was putting the Valiant through its paces when they came to the winding turns that made the road so interesting to boys of a certain age and disposition. It was there that David lost control of the car and it flipped up on its side, skidding to a crunching stop against a large boulder on the side of the road.

I wasn’t there but I imagine the rear end of the car breaking loose first, swinging in ever larger arcs as David sought to wrestle the car back under control while the bias ply tires shrieked across the asphalt, the momentum building and the car reaching its apex before suddenly flipping on its side. The sounds of metal against pavement, of glass shattering from the impact, of the roof crushing inward towards their heads must have been devastating, echoing across the eternity of those scant seconds before a great silence descended upon the carnage.

Miraculously, neither David nor Don was injured and they crawled out of the car to survey the damage. They managed to muscle the car back onto its wheels – the roof crushed and the side planed flat by the car’s high-energy excursion across the pavement. Improbably, David was able to drive the car back to our house, no doubt a spectacle to any who saw him passing by, and Don, I think, hoofed it back to his house.

These were the ‘60s and, it being late on a Saturday afternoon, most shops and businesses were shuttering their doors until Monday. David tried his darndest to find a repair shop that was open on Sunday, something that was prohibited by the “blue laws” of the day. It was magical thinking that had him believing that it was even possible to repair that much damage in the few short hours remaining before Lane, Gloria, and my parents returned. When all hope was finally extinguished, he very carefully moved the Valiant back into exactly the spot it was parked in when they’d left and proceeded to work on his preposterous story: “What? Something happened to Lane’s car?!”

When my parents and company returned, they were dumbstruck at the vision of the Valiant, crushed and ravaged and looking for all the world as if an asteroid had landed on it. My father stormed in the house and, finding me first, demanded to know what had happened. I pulled my best Sergeant Shultz and claimed “I know nothing!” Given that I was 14 at the time, I think my father was predisposed to excluding me from the suspect pool. He found David in our room, called bullshit on his feigned innocence, and kept him in his bedroom on a bread-and-water diet until he fessed up. It took three whole days – David was, if nothing else, resolute.

These things have a way of making us stronger and David most assuredly learned several important lessons from this experience about truth and taking responsibility for his actions. It is, no doubt, one of the reasons he’s a straight-and-narrow, stand-up guy today and why he has the wonderful and responsible children that he does. I wonder, though, if he realizes how fabulously fortunate he was on that long-ago Saturday afternoon when the rubber left the road, and metal and rock and velocity and mass all pardoned Don and him from a profoundly worse fate.

Kit Crowne